18 October 2014

'It was she [Benoist’s Grandmother] who first taught me the meaning of noblesse oblige: viz., that belonging to the aristocracy does not consist in benefiting from more privileges than others or in having additional rights, but in imposing greater burdens upon one oneself, having a higher notion of one’s duties, feeling more responsible than others. Behaving in a noble manner, whatever class one comes from, means never being satisfied with oneself, never reasoning in terms of utility. It means the beauty of gratuitousness, of “useless” expenditure, the beau geste, the conviction that one could always have done better, that it is odious to boast of what one has done, that a man’s quality is tested by his ability to act contrary to his own interests whenever it becomes necessary.'

3 comments:

Robert
said...

WOW!!! This says it all. A way of living life that is vanishing like the buffalo (and just as thinned as their herds). Unfortunately, unlike the buffalo the practitioners of this way of life overwhelming white, are not a "protected species".We have instead chosen to elevate the moral, mores and way of life of our African-American citizens as the way to live.Why have a society where people are civil to each other and are keenly aware and practice a code of decent behavior when you can substitute the "law of the jungle" and peel a few bananas with your toes while emulating those who have only been liberated from living in the jungle a few generations ago.The practice of "noblesse oblige" is all but gone in the USA and I will be one of the few that miss it.Society will be the poorer for it's passing.Can you pass me a chunk of watermelon?

Ivar:I couldn't agree with you more as far as history isn't linear. I am a believer in cyclical history.According to wiki...with a few comments by me:Cyclical history conceptions were maintained in the 19th and 20th centuries by authors such as Oswald Spengler, Nikolay Danilevsky, and Paul Kennedy, who conceived the human past as a series of repetitive rises and falls. Spengler was writing in reaction to the carnage of the first World War, believed that a civilization enters upon an era of Caesarism after its soul dies. He thought that the soul of the West was dead and Caesarism was about to begin.The recent development of mathematical models of long-term secular sociodemographic cycles has revived interest in cyclical theories of history (see, for example, Historical Dynamics by Peter Turchin, or Introduction to Social Macrodynamics[ by Andrey Korotayev et al.).If our society does not take a stand to halt the current cycle of the exalting of the "other than whites" and the denigration of the white race then you you will have, eventually, the rise of a coloured form of Caesarism.[For those who wonder what Caesarism is I quote from "wiki" with my comments addedCaesarism is a form of political rule that emulates the rule of Roman dictator Julius Caesar over the Roman Republic, in that it is led by a charismatic strongman whose rule is based upon a cult of personality, whose rationale is the need to rule by force, establishing a violent social order, and being a regime involving prominence of the non whites in the government.]We are not there yet but we are moving towards it with the speed of a run away freight train and while it may not be written yet if we don't move to reverse the current cycle it will be as the line from the film "The Ten Commandments"...."so it is written!...so it shall be!"